“Look out, Haskell, it’s real!” So warns an off-camera crewmember as a police-thrown tear gas canister rolls towards the director during one of the more cataclysmic verité sequences at the center of this monumental doc/fiction hybrid. The shouted alert (added in post-production) is almost too perfect an outcry to be contained in a restless film which constantly yaws back and forth between “reality” and “artifice.” Just before the summer of ’68, Wexler, fresh off an Oscar win for cinematography, cashed in his clout to convince Paramount to back an experimental trip to Chicago, where, he assured newly installed studio boss Robert Evans, an important movie would emerge. He was right. Wexler, interrogating his own profession, created a loose fictional story around a proxy character — a cold-eyed, Eclair-wielding television reporter (the stoic, sinewy Robert Forster) who navigates the run-up to the real-life Democratic National Convention while carrying on a tender affair with a young widowed mother (Verna Bloom). While in town, Wexler and crew would immerse themselves in the political moment, capturing a thick slice of the zeitgeist including police riot training sessions, precious scenes of the now-vanished “hillbilly tenements” of Uptown, and of course the well-known police-led riots that shocked a divided nation. The finished film daringly, perhaps irresponsibly, entwines such footage with the devised narrative to create a blurred statement of radical poetry, all the more potent for its being a major studio film at a time of major industry transition. As Chicagoans enter another turbulent political season, in which our city will again play host to a DNC against a backdrop of war and unrest, we owe it to ourselves to wrestle with the images and ideas of this untidy document. Chicago Film Society has commissioned a new print of Medium Cool for our permanent collection, special thanks to Paramount Pictures Corporation and FotoKem.

Preceded by:  “The People’s Right to Know: Police vs. Reporters” (The Film Group, 1969) – 14 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Archives. Preserved with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation